The Egalitarian Pill

Date: January 24, 2019
Canonical: 16254
Archive: 16254 [history]
Categories: Badder Thoughts , Culture , Greatest Hits

There are many reasons to hate libertarians, all of them valid, but the most compelling reason is their misplaced self-assurance. Libertarians walk around sure they have gained access to the book of secret knowledge, while everyone else is staggering around in primitive darkness. In reality, modern libertarianism is mostly just window dressing for the oogily-boogily that comes from the Left. Libertarians start from the same misplaced beliefs about the human condition.

A good example is this post from Reason Magazine celebrating the start of National School Choice Week. According to their website, it is “a week of celebration to raise public awareness of the different K-12 education options available to children and families while also spotlighting the benefits of school choice.” Reason Magazine is a big fan of school choice, so they are doing some celebrating of their own, promoting various studies about the glories of school choice.

Nowhere is the magical thinking more evident than in education. While they do not go so far as to embrace magic dirt theory, like their progressive counterparts, they do believe in the magic of location. For example, the first bullet point of that post says, “Eighteen empirical studies have examined academic outcomes for school choice participants using random assignment, the gold standard of social science. Of those, 14 find choice improves student outcomes.”

Without reading a single study, anyone with the least bit of math and science knows that these studies are nonsense. There is simply no way to net out certain immutable facts about the human condition, to isolate the effects of choice. For example, smart parents, who invest in their children, are much more likely to take advantage of school choice programs than dull or indifferent parents. Parents who like learning and value knowledge will have kids who like learning and value knowledge.

The only way you could really test these various education theories, including school choice, is to do a twin study. One twin is ripped away from his parents and placed with some dullards, who are happy to send him to the local public school. The other twin is ripped from his parents and placed in a home with high investment and access to school choice. Then maybe you could get some useful data. That is monstrous and no one would ever agree to anything close to it, so it will never happen.

Another point on the list states, “Ten empirical studies have examined school choice and racial segregation in schools. Of those, nine find school choice moves students from more segregated schools into less segregated schools.” Since we know the number of parents seeking to send their kids to majority black schools rounds to zero, this is a point against school choice but the modern libertarian has slugged down the multicultural ambrosia, so they cannot follow their own arguments here.

Education is a function of biology. Smart kids tend to have smart parents and dumb kids tend to have dumb parents. Intelligence correlates with things like parental investment, peer selection, community involvement and so forth. The reason the kids at the school in the white suburbs do better than the kids at the ghetto school is they come from better parents. Their parents built a stronger community, invested in their children, and passed on their intelligence and social fitness to their kids.

The amusing part of the whole school choice debate is the left fully understands what is really going on here. Middle-class white parents want to avoid subjecting their kids to black kids. They will accept some of it if the vibrancy has to pass through a filtering mechanism to weed out the really vibrant. The left gets this, while libertarians and conservatives are drunk off their own fumes. If there is such a thing as “systemic racism” it is school choice.

This highlights the fundamental flaw of libertarianism. It is the same flaw that has made Buckley-style conservatism utterly worthless. They accept the progressive premise that there is no such thing as biology. People come into the world as amorphous blobs that can be shaped into proper citizens with the proper policies. Once you take the egalitarian pill, the world stops making sense. From there it is an endless search for the right set of policies to make everyone equal.

The fact is, there is no fixing the schools. John Derbyshire brilliantly made this point in his global best seller We Are Doomed. Tens of billions have been poured into every conceivable education scheme. None have done anything to address the achievement gap, and none have done anything to mitigate the inheritance gap. The best way to become a smart, educated person is to be born to parents who are smart and well educated. The schools can do nothing to make this happen.

That does not mean schools should be ignored. Public education, like public health, is a thing we expect government to manage. Instead of flushing billions down the drain fighting biological reality, vocational schools, and the availability of jobs for people on the left side of the curve is the answer. No society can tolerate an excess of idle men, so fixing the schools in the ghetto means giving all those idle men something to do other than make babies, who will follow in their path.

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Comments (Historical)

The comments below were originally posted to thezman.com.

187 Comments

hokkoda #88009 January 24, 2019 8:27 am 70

School choice was developed to give parents a way to opt out of the frequently-dangerous public education system because not everybody can afford a private school. The elites who come up with this stuff do not have to put their kids in the schools they champion. Normal people understand this. That’s why if you were to do a quick poll of what parents of parochial school children do for a living…a surprising number of the children have one or more parents teaching at the local public school.The Libertarians gussy it up in language about the power of free markets, but that’s just window dressing. The brutal truth is that school choice charter schools are just the suburbs on an educational scale…the where place people flee in order to escape societal breakdown in the city. But they call it school choice because the alternative – calling it a school for children who do not want to be assaulted at lunch by the local miscreants or sit in a classroom of kids jumping around like zoo animals – would be ‘racist’.So, this is an area where I’ll accept the newspeak language and just admit that my kids go to the local charter school down the hill. We enrolled them there 12 years ago because we looked at the school district and where things were heading, and we made good choices. This is not exclusive to white people. I meet kids every day in my job whose parents are borderline morons raising kids who are actual morons and nobody gives a rat about school at all. I meet kids from good families trying to succeed in schools where doing so is met with scorn and derision. Their parents failed them. It’s cruel to say it, but that’s just the truth. I have parents who come to me for advice and I tell them in no uncertain terms, “Get your kid outta that school, and do it today.” At first they are skeptical. Then they reach their breaking point. Then they change and enroll their kid at the local charter…and they come in and day, “We had no idea!”Anyway, I couldn’t care less if study x says “better outcomes” or study y says “worse outcomes”. Bunch of academics who don’t have kids trying to secure next year’s grant money. I know, because I can see it, that at the end of their 12 years in this school my kids are going to come out the other side better educated and better prepared for the world than 95% of the math students I meet every day at the public high school.Schools are a reflection of the families who send their kids there. My one caution is that white people not get complacent about this stuff. Way too many white parents couldn’t give two shits about their child’s education. They’ll yell and scream about it, but they won’t DO anything about it. They won’t work with their kid at home. They won’t meet with the teacher. They won’t discipline their child or take away Johnny’s cell phone. They won’t lift a finger. Then when you tell them this, they get outraged.

Compsci #88073 January 24, 2019 12:08 pm 7

Hokkoda, well said. Long time Libertarian here, now ex-Lib. “Who cares the color of the cat as long as it catches mice.” Indeed, leaving out the concept of race, to promote school choice, is a wise move that all proponents of school choice should follow—for now. The truth will out in the end.

hokkoda #88153 January 24, 2019 6:48 pm 13

As I tease my lefty friends on social media, they might be fantastic anti-racists, but they all seem to find ways to live “somewhere else”.

roo_ster #88089 January 24, 2019 12:36 pm 16

We pay 2x more to educate our children every year than we pay for housing. We drive our autos until the wheels fall off. Vacations are visits to family.Others move out to BFE and fight traffic for an hour+ each way to work. Still others eschew full time employment so one parent can home school or home school co-op(1).Any way you look at it, getting your kids a good education away from the troglodytes is not cheap....(1) The wave of the future is a 2 days/week home school co-op schools. At least for white folks who care about their kids.

hokkoda #88113 January 24, 2019 2:35 pm 9

I’ve long believed that parents with 3 or more children should basically be exempted from income taxes until their children are fully emancipated or age 22 (end of college) whichever comes first.

Walt #88141 January 24, 2019 4:52 pm 2

Or move to Australia. Don’t bring the troglodytes with you though.

Rod1963 #88162 January 24, 2019 8:52 pm 2

The future is NOT SENDING YOUR KIDS to college to be brainwashed and turned into debt serfs before they even get going.Nor for that matter are most public schools due to the inclusion of Common Core. and other methods that kill a child’s curiosity and love of learning.when they turn 18, send them to a trade school. It’s far cheaper, no brainwashing and if they chose well they’ll make good $$$.Those who think college is a route to go are still living in 1980 like the CivNats and some HBD’ers who are still enamored by credentials(power totems for moderns). They can be safely ignored.

hokkoda #88171 January 24, 2019 11:01 pm 2

Yes and no. My daughter wants to be a doctor, my son a fighter pilot. There are still careers, good ones, that require college. Not saying it’s for everyone.

Corvinus #88427 January 27, 2019 9:59 am 0

If we assume that kids are being sent to public school and college to be brainwashed, then that means those parents–who happen to be white–are other than intelligent. I thought white people in general had a higher IQ than non-white people. Furthermore, it would mean white people are easily duped. You really are bordering on anti-white propaganda here.

hokkoda #89148 January 31, 2019 2:50 pm 1

Kind of a silly comment since most white people are making a “trade off” between sanctimonious gasbag Leftists in the social sciences vs. the fact that the average lifetime earnings of college graduates dwarfs non college graduates at present.Stupid? No. Just balancing the books, so to speak.This is something my daughter and I talk about quite a lot. I show her what these ass clown college professors are saying in the classrooms, and remind her that from almost the instant she steps on campus, she will be a target for religious conversion by campus radicals. And, that she has to be aware of it and not fall victim to it.Also, unlike many of her non-white, non-Asian peers, she will show up on campus able to actually do the math.

LineInTheSand #88156 January 24, 2019 7:42 pm 2

Once more for emphasis: “The brutal truth is that school choice charter schools are just the suburbs on an educational scale…”

LeafyGreen #88233 January 25, 2019 9:51 pm 0

If anybody is wondering why is Betsy DeVos so demonized, these samples of juicy literature might help:FORWARD dot COM, November 28, 2016, by Jay Michaelson:“But charter schools are only one step of the strategy. To the extent this is allowed by the Constitution, the agenda of the DeVos family foundations is to re-Christianize America and to replace the melting pot or gorgeous mosaic of our current secular society with an imagined America of a hundred years ago: white-dominated, Christian-dominated, traditional in values and orientation.Oh, and of course, along the way the Department of Education will immediately reverse course on multiculturalism and recognition of LGBT and racial diversity. This doesn’t mean only eliminating protections for transgender kids or sex education programs; that would just put us back to zero. No, I mean reversing course: promoting curricula that say that sexual orientation is changeable, that gender is determined at birth along with sex, that sexual and racial differences on test scores and the like are the result of genetic sexual and racial differences.Of course, some foolish Orthodox Jewish organizations have signed onto “school choice” initiatives, since they promise a short-term financial windfall for Orthodox Jewish schools — as if a few dollars thrown to them will not be drowned out by a thousand times as many poured into Christian schools. These fools are modern-day Esaus, exchanging the birthright of American democracy for a bowl of voucher porridge…”More recent, but similar article is in COMMENTARY MAGAZINE, April 2017by Eric Cohen: Jewish Conservatism: A Manifesto

Matrix #88018 January 24, 2019 9:30 am 33

This is such a spot on post! I have been in education in some form or another my whole life. You would not believe how blind professional educators are. There is always a new program that will fix the problem. A new admin will come in and implement the newest research, pad the resume, and then move on to a higher paid position. Slash and burn. This is done, over, and over, creating an ever-expanding bureaucracy. that sees no end.Couple that with the fact that there is absolutely no responsibility laid on kids for their behavior and you have an endless excuse, victimization machine, that feeds on itself. Solution, pull out the kids who will do the work and focus on them. The kids that won’t, put them into some real physical work that might help them gain a appreciation of what has to be done in life.

Epaminondas #88056 January 24, 2019 11:20 am 4

So when the counter-revolution gets underway, how do we identify the bad guys in education? Seems to me you are all being tarred from the same brush merely by participating in that ghastly racket.

hokkoda #88099 January 24, 2019 1:20 pm 9

You don’t have to identify individuals. You simply cut 70% of the administrative overhead. Most teachers are outnumbered 3-4-5:1 by non-teaching staff. That’s where a lot of the trouble comes from. Also, gut the “education licensing” bureaucracy. It’s merely a system of indoctrination. You’re not there to learn how to be a better teacher. You’re there to learn how to be culturally sensitive to your non-English speaking students and all the LGBTQ stuff. Pure indoctrination.No, rather than try to ID problem people, gut the overhead. Too many grifters who add not a penny of educational value, but who create reems of bureaucracy and call it “progress”.

Matrix #88107 January 24, 2019 2:17 pm 5

If we get into something that we really enjoy, the natural inclination is for us to be the best at it that we can be. Competition drives all of us. Unfortunately, educators are notorious in taking soft research and creating new initiatives that are going to save the day. Never ending new initiatives. We had the bus the under-privileged into our school program because research showed that you could bring test scores up immersed in quality teaching. All bullshit! All that happened was their test scores actually went down over time. They couldn’t keep up with the pace and intern created an enormous amount of admin to deal with them. We disbanded the program and guess what, the admin stayed. Have a couple more years left with the golden hand-cuffs. The Bad students book by Weissberg is absolutely correct, tough to teach kids when the only thing they want to do is play fort-night, watch slap-chat, and vape.We are doomed!

hokkoda #88114 January 24, 2019 2:38 pm 7

Build the toll booth to pay for the bridge, and when the bridge is paid for, the toll booth doesn’t come down. A lot of what teachers have to put up with is all the people who make money changing the names for everything from one year to the next. Last year it was called this. This year it’s renamed something else, and there’s a 3-hour training module that must be completed. Most of the time, it’s stuff about teaching that people have known for 1,000 years, but they give it a new name and call it progress.

S. Bishop #88183 January 25, 2019 5:55 am 5

Good point, Hokkoda: “A lot of what teachers have to put up with is all the people who make money changing the names for everything from one year to the next.” Sounds very much like the Human Resources Department in every large corporation. Basically grifters who latch on to every sanctioned government mandate and set up ‘shaming’ mechanisms or outright punishments for those that don’t toe the line – all while grossly inflating their own self-importance and contribution.

Compsci #88079 January 24, 2019 12:21 pm 7

The best writing on this is “Bad Students, not Bad Schools” by Weissberg. He cites study after study indicating the failure of school improvement projects to back up his case.

hokkoda #88149 January 24, 2019 6:25 pm 8

Good book, a solid run-down here for the uninitiated…https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/bad-students-not-bad-schools-by-robert-weissberg/The principal at my school is from industry, not the Educomplex. She and I talk about this all the time. If they want to bring their test scores up, they need to do two things: improve the scores a little bit for the bottom 25%, and maximize the scores for the top 25%. The first one will have a greater impact because a 0% weighs heavily on the scores, whereas improving the top 25% of kids by 2-3% will barely move the needle. Alternately, take the bottom 1/4 and show them the door to an apprenticeship or trade school.She, in turn, likes to point out that for every 100 kids at the school, only about 60% will apply to go to college, only half of those will complete their freshmen year, and only half still of those will complete a 4-year degree…or about 15/100 something like that. “Yet,” she says,”We have to get everyone ‘college ready’! It’s an impossible task when you’re starting with half the population that literally doesn’t give a damn.”

Compsci #88201 January 25, 2019 10:38 am 1

Again, Hokkoda, excellent summary. Going from the biological explanation backward…what percentage of the population has the intellectual horsepower to succeed in a rigorous STEM degree course of studies in University? Forget about the phony degrees given out to all who have money and can fog a mirror. Rigorous field of study (which is the only reason to be in University, albeit it is now basically a remedial follow up to High School) takes about an IQ of 120+, perhaps as low as 110-115 if you are very motivated and conscientious. That’s about 10-20% of the population (and of course, far fewer minorities). How many did you say graduate? After how many years? I rest my case.

Anon #88020 January 24, 2019 9:52 am 23

I’m no fan of libertarianism and a big fan of this blog. But on this one you got some things wrong.Random assignment studies are the statistical equivalent of twin studies. If you use a large enough sample size and randomly assign members to two groups, they are statistical twins. Using this strategy, you can then validly compare school choice and traditional schools. The same thing is true in drug studies. You don’t have to test out drugs on twins. You run a random assignment study.As it turns out, these studies show that kids from low-income backgrounds, especially minorities, do quite a bit better in charter schools (i.e., public school choice) than kids in traditional schools. Of course the major reason why does not fit the left’s agenda. More in-depth studies have found that well-run charter schools produce better outcomes for one reason: improved discipline. It turns out that schools where you don’t let the bad apples run amok provide better educational outcomes for everyone else. The downside is that a lot of brown and black kids get disciplined quite a bit, which the left hates.Not all charter schools are well-run, so the effect is not uniform, but the overall effect is a net positive.Another caveat: School choice generally does not provide better educational outcomes in middle class white communities. Why? White kids are better behaved, so the discpline differences don’t make much difference.Beyond educational improvements, the other dirty little secret of school choice is that it increases racial segregation in schools. White parents use these schools to escape vibrancy when that is their only option. Minority parents will also send their kids to charter schools, even when they are predominantly minority, so long as the school is well-run and discipline is maintained. In fact, a lot of charter school operators specialize in these kinds of kids. The overall effect is to increase racial segregation, while simultaneously improving educational outcomes, which drives the left bananas.Final point. While well-run charter schools improve educational outcomes, mostly for minority kids, they have not eliminated the achievement gap between white and minority kids. They have only narrowed it – slightly. And if you provide the same opportunities to white kids, the net effect will probably be a small improvement for every kid, and zero change in the achievement gap.

DLS #88061 January 24, 2019 11:25 am 9

You make some good points, but there is no random assignment in school choice. If parents are free to choose their schools, the brighter ones, along with their brighter children, will choose better schools and bias the samples. If you are suggesting a random process for trying to force minorities into white schools, you still have to account for the minority parents that refuse. And those that don’t refuse probably have the brighter kids.

Oldvannes #88070 January 24, 2019 11:59 am 4

This study isn’t random. The people who choose charter schools are already a self selecting group.A true random study in this context would not randomly draw from 2 groups but from a single group: in an area randomly choose families with school aged children. Then compare family attitudes towards education, educational attainment, income, school choice, etc. Then you can compare and contrast variations in the data.Starting out by having already separated general public schools (and these studies probably went looking for crappy ones) from charter schools already makes all kinds of assumptions about the populations.Think of it this way, having already separated the population into public vs charter, how well could one predict the outcome of the study with doing no more than make that initial divide?In a double blind study, the subjects all think they’ve made the same choice and they all begin with the same conditions. The entire starting population is self selecting (a particular illness). No one divided them before hand.

Larkin Lover #88072 January 24, 2019 12:03 pm 3

Random assignment in drugs is different from random assignment in social science where there is human selection preference. As DLS observed, the charter school effect is based on genetics in fact. The schools evaluate for parental support and motivation, which are correlated with higher IQ. Also discipline probably plays a role, but again the charter school subset is already more disciplined by nature.

Compsci #88087 January 24, 2019 12:32 pm 2

As long as the weaker students do not lower standards, I’m on board. i’ve been through this before and seen such in action—where teachers “teach” to the lowest denominator. That actually was my initial switch to a Charter school from Public.

Anon #88097 January 24, 2019 1:06 pm 2

@DLS and @Yves VannesThere actually is random assignment in school choice, sometimes system-wide across entire cities. The (valid) point you are actually making is that kids who win the random assignment still come from families who care enough to sign them up – and they are thus more motivated than other parents who couldn’t be bothered.But the studies aren’t comparing those two groups. They are looking at results for a large group of parents, ALL of whom signed up for the school, but only half of whom actually got in. In the studies, all of the parents were equally motivated. When they did that, what they found was that the kids who got into the charter school did better than the kids who did not.This says nothing about the kids and parents who never bothered to even try to get into the charter school. On that point you are absolutely right. But it does say that the charter schools provide a (small) net benefit for those who try to get in.At the end of the day, charter schools are not going to solve poverty or eliminate racial differences. But they do seem to improve educational outcomes for poor kids stuck in really bad schools. And they provide a rescue line for poor whites stuck in that situation.Perhaps more important than anything else, as demographic change continues to works its ill effects across the country, charter schools are likely to be a lifeline for the majority of white kids who can’t afford private schools.

thezman #88103 January 24, 2019 1:53 pm 13

At the end of the day, charter schools are not going to solve poverty or eliminate racial differences. But they do seem to improve educational outcomes for poor kids stuck in really bad schools. And they provide a rescue line for poor whites stuck in that situation.Or, those kids have parents who place some value in education and have a low time preference. Those qualities are passed onto the children. The environment had no bearing on their outcome. Again, unless you can rerun the experiment with the same kid in different schools, results are notional.Don’t get me wrong, sending a smart, well behaved child to a ghetto school is going to reduce their chances of success. Environment is not meaningless. It’s just that once you move from the extremes, environment becomes trivial. So yeah, test the kids and pluck the smart ones from the ghetto schools. We’re talking small number though. That’s not about pedagogy. That’s simply about harm reduction.

hokkoda #88151 January 24, 2019 6:36 pm 3

“Again, unless you can rerun the experiment with the same kid in different schools, results are notional.”I actually see this quite often. For many years I ran an after-school tutoring business. Kids would come in from the public schools a disaster. I would work with them, and there would be some marginal improvement, but I would point out to the parents that it’s like the school is rowing in the opposite direction from us. The kids often wouldn’t thrive. At that point (sometimes much sooner depending on the child’s school), I’d recommend Charter Academy X nearby. The parents would tell me they are strong believers in the public school system, and that they’re just not sure about those charters.“Do me a favor. Go over to the charter school for a visit with the principal. But the first thing I want you to think about when you walk into the school during school hours is this: stop and LISTEN.” Most are like churches inside. Quiet. You can feel the emphasis on learning. Many require a simple uniform (red/blue/green shirt and khakis, for example, or the one common polo shirt all the kids are required to wear). The classrooms are quiet and respectful.Usually not long after that, maybe a few months, I’d notice a huge change in the student’s outlook and performance. I’d notice the school uni, the eagerness to learn, the drive.The parents were no different in terms of their intensity or focus on their kids than they were at the public school. They had the same expectations of their kids. They worked just as hard. Then they moved their kid into the local charter, and it was like watching your puppy bolt out of the house when you left the screen door open. FREEDOM!!!I saw this a lot. I saw it with white kids, Asian kids, Hispanic kids, black kids, you name it. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. But you can lead a thirsty horse to water, and he’ll down the water with gusto.There are also some charters that are far better than others. Often I would suggest the parents tour Charter Academy Y and see if it’s a better fit than X. Usually, it worked out in their favor to move.Parenting is tough. You have to carefully align your goals, your kid’s goals, the school’s goals, etc. and get everybody rowing in the same direction. Any of those rows the wrong way and the boat stops. Standard 3-legged stool analogy, I know.Divorced parents are a perfect example of this. Usually they’ll pit the child against the ex-spouse to win the child’s favor. Disneyland Dads/Moms they’re called. I would often feel terrible for the children because the parents would just use the children to fight their battles.

DLS #88119 January 24, 2019 2:56 pm 1

I see your point. The average inner city teacher is what you would expect from a typical government union worker, so a more intelligent, motivated charter teacher in a better environment has to have some effect. The question is whether the charter school improvement is enough to bridge the divide between a vocational vs. white collar career. My hunch is it could help overcome 5 IQ points, but not 15.

Yves Vannes #88120 January 24, 2019 3:02 pm 4

Signing up and following through are two very different things. This is a “black fathers read to their children more often than whites do” kind of study. They assume in a very general way that all seemingly non relevant factors can be treated as irrelevant or they assume under the same conditions all groups should have the same outcome.This is one of the reasons most studies in the social sciences fail in repeating their initial celebrated outcomes: The sampling techniques are full of errors and poorly thought out implications.If you can accurately predict the out come of a study simply by separating the population before sampling each group you’ve already set in a bias.Think of the double blind medical studies again: If I take most of the sickest ones and put them in group 1, then I take the more healthy ones and put them in group two before I even sample the groups I’ve already biased the test. Then I give the sickest group a placebo and the healthier one the medication. If the medication works the health group get healthier, if it doesn’t the healthier group still comes out as healthier. So I still don’t know how effective the meds are.Charter schools may help some kids who are capable but were screwed in their old school. But it’s not the school, it’s the population, a self selecting one.This is the problem with many many many “studies” in the social sciences and increasingly in the sciences themselves; they set up initial conditions in a population BEFORE sampling that bias the outcomes in the direction that leads to the desired conclusions.

Dean Jonathan Swift #88071 January 24, 2019 12:00 pm 22

1. There is no such thing as an “achievement gap.” Black children are already pretty much achieving whatever it is they are capable of achieving. Water seeks its own level. The overall market is by now pretty heavily over-saturated for blacks trained to leap about and throw a rubber ball through a hoop or to shout rhyming obscenities into a microphone. So is the market for blacks who cannot actually discharge the duties of a bank Vice President or a chemistry professor, but who can be trained to talk like one. There’s nothing shameful about working at the post office or UPS.2. School de-segregation has been an absolute disaster for the country and a nightmare for White families, exactly as planned. It has disrupted and torn apart White communities, caused White ethnic cleansing from the cities Whites themselves built, vastly increased the costs of White family formation (thereby catastrophically ruining White fertility), ruined or degraded the educational opportunities of White children, and caused countless White children to be exposed to assault, rape, constant harrassment, and lasting emotional trauma. Again, exactly as planned.3. The actual purpose of school desegregation was not to raise educational levels for blacks, it was to use blacks as a biological weapon against White goyim to sow chaos and churn in destabilized White communities. Who profits from constant churn? Why, I believe it’s generally the middlemen. White families are ruined and reduced, and you can make a shekel off both ends? Win-win.4. The fastest actual realistic way to restore American educational policy to rationality would be to flat-out admit the realities of the present structures and valences of political power in America. Once these are openly admitted, the path is clear:a) point out the obvious — that the black/Jewish achievement gap is vastly wider than the black/white gap.b) since IQ does not exist, the only explanation for much higher Jewish achievement is that Jewish schools are magical “good schools”, and as we know, black underachievement is solely due to lack of access to these “good schools”. And as the data clearly show us, Jewish schools are the absolute best and most magical of the “good schools”. Therefore,c) issue tons and tons of free school vouchers for massive swarms of black and Latino students to attend private Jewish schools, so that D’Trayvious and Sh’Quonqua can reap the same “good school” benefits as Shmuel and Judith. After all, if exposure to White students can benefit blacks, think of how much more they’ll benefit by exposure to Jews! (1)d) watch in amazement how quickly tons of “studies” and policy initiatives and Congressional committees suddenly appear to proclaim the amazing discovery that it turns out that total school segregation is the ONLY practical answer after all!(1): the fact that black and Latino students are not Jewish is no obstacle to their attending Jewish schools. Jews themselves have a long tradition of infiltrating Catholic and Episcopal schools, when these could confer advantage and prestige.

Alzaebo #88101 January 24, 2019 1:28 pm 8

Ha ha! Fabulous! Since the gap is great, and since civil rights means ‘access to white people’, should we not bridge that gap with access to the greatest special magic of all? Let the Most Virtuous show us the way. Integrated yeshiva- think of the restaurants they’ll create!

Mike_C #88176 January 25, 2019 12:11 am 2

If only it were possible to upvote more than once. But this, alas, is not a federal election.

Glen Filthie #88008 January 24, 2019 7:49 am 19

Libertarians are pretty much as you described. They have all the answers, you are full of chit, full stop, end of story.I’ve noticed that most have had traumatic childhoods too. Abusive or uncaring parents, family members that are booze or alcohol addicts, you name it. Like most zealots – the majority of them aren’t that bright. Some have “book” or academic smarts… but no common sense. Those idiots WILL parachute drop their kids into vibrant schools and fully expect success. If the kid manages it they will crow to one and all about the righteousness of their ways. If they fail they’ll blame everyone but themselves.Eff ‘em. To me the difference between a libertarian and a progtard is purely conversational.

Darth Curmudgeon #88010 January 24, 2019 8:45 am 68

The one endearing trait that Libertarians have is that at least they don’t want your stuff. Progressives want you dead, want your stuff, and want to diddle your children.

DeBeers Diamonds #88013 January 24, 2019 9:10 am 18

Lolbertarians inevitably end up as the stooges of monopolists. They may not directly want your stuff, but their Koch and Google paymasters do.

DLS #88047 January 24, 2019 11:01 am 23

Progressives don’t want you dead. It’s worse than that. They want you plugged into the matrix, afraid to think or speak, working your ass off to atone for your racist, sexist, homophobic thoughts. They, as the enlightened virtuous few, will mange the wealth transfers without creating any of their own.

King Tut #88053 January 24, 2019 11:17 am 25

I’m not sure that the proglodytes want us dead. As zman has pointed out they understand biology and they realise that if we dead we cannot keep them in the luxury they yearn for. No what they want is for white men to be yoked like water buffalo who will reliably yield bumper harvests for them and their many vibrant clients without a murmur of complaint.

roo_ster #88084 January 24, 2019 12:28 pm 20

Yeah, but that argues that their intellect will rule their impulses once they get undisputed killing/controlling power over the rest of us. I am not betting that they will exhibit such restraint and not kill the cow they benefit from milking.

TBoone #88094 January 24, 2019 12:54 pm 7

Well said. Deep in their shiny, tiny Lil hearts they Know the Cow is irredeemably Raycis/HateY & Mean. Must.. Make. Example. For the virtue signify’n…..

Range Front Fault #88172 January 24, 2019 11:02 pm 1

Agree. Once the firestorm hits it will feed until it sucks out all air completely like a firenado, including feeding off itself and all until it dies out from lack of oxygen, almost a fire suicide. He who lives by the sword, dies by the sword, and so on…with emphasis on he who wields the sword.

Screwtape #88076 January 24, 2019 12:13 pm 3

Yes, Libertardians tend to have stuff so they aren’t inclined to agitate for yours.Self-interest combined with somewhat muted envy and covetousness as a result of said stuff – and just enough intelligence to connect the accumulation of their stuff with hard work, insulates them from the leftoid impulse to ask big daddy govt to take yours.Time will tell tho. As credentialism overtakes gumption and grit as the striving virtue in this class, the reality of how one accumulates stuff runs threadbare against the idea that one is owed certain standards of living.Cue envy and coveting of thy neighbor and soon the difference between them and the leftiods downstream fades away.

Frip #88106 January 24, 2019 2:10 pm 7

The comments from John Smith down to Screwtape were funny. I like how the opinions evolved from Progs wanting us dead, to Progs wanting us alive as useful cogs…then back to wanting us dead. LOL. I think Roo_ster has it right.

BadThinker #88126 January 24, 2019 3:41 pm 6

Some of the more sexually-libertine Libertarians probably do want to diddle your children, so long as “it’s consensual”.

ron #88144 January 24, 2019 5:28 pm 5

you left outthe fact that liebertarians have no cause and effect genes, which causes all their problems in the first place!

Al from da Nort #88064 January 24, 2019 11:31 am 18

Time to think outside the box. The most historically effective educational segregation that dare not say its name today is sex segregated education. It is a particularly effective remedy for lower income males, most especially those past the age of puberty. It used to be the rule for urban parochial schools (not just Catholic) for good reason. Where I grew up in the boonies, $$$ was the reason for not doing it.A number of commenters have rightly observed that one big reason charter schools outperform public schools is discipline.– First, Sex segregated education allows for the forms of discipline most effective to each sex.– Second, it removes a major cause of disorder, namely the amount of time and energy each sex spends trying to impress the other.– Third, it creates space for the male teacher role models so important to fatherless boys these days.– Fourth, it allows the curriculum to be tailored to the different aptitudes and interests of each sex in numerous, easy (even humorous) ways (e.g. How long does a Roman scaling ladder need to be to get over a 12′ high Goth timber palisade_? The ideal base placement is 2/10 of the height away from the bottom of the wall. Make a drawing showing your work).– For ‘trad con’ fans, it has well over 2,000 years of tradition behind it.– Last, not least, for HBD fans: if anything is in accordance with HBR (human biological reality) it’s immutable sex differences. So sex segregated education meets the new ideological purity test. 😉At the very least, in debating this topic it would be great fun telling the feminatzis that we’re only trying to create some *really* safe spaces for women to thrive.I became familiar with this topic a looong time ago by being a smart-ass in speech class and thereby being assigned to defend the affirmative case for sex segregated classes in school. I found it shockingly easy to craft a plausible case.

DLS #88045 January 24, 2019 10:52 am 18

My father worked in the St. Louis City public schools administering advanced placement tests, which were basically IQ tests. At that time I was a full on school choice advocate. Despite my father being a union liberal, his stock answer to the question of how to improve the black schools was that there was only one way – to start with smarter students. It took me awhile to accept that, but now I see it clearly. My own high school kids have vibrancy taxied in from the city. They hate it because the vibrants are disruptive but untouchable. The theory is that integration will pull up black achievement. The reality is that it just pulls down white achievement. And what’s left in the city schools basically turns them into juvenile detention centers. The issue of disparities in education is virtually the same as with healthcare. There is no way to arrange the pieces to create a good solution.

Compsci #88096 January 24, 2019 1:04 pm 7

Actually, it’s more insipid than that. Spreading out vibrancy pulls down the standing of the heretofore non-vibrant schools thereby masking the starkness of the difference and making the school district look better.

O Gangster #88012 January 24, 2019 9:09 am 17

I must say I get confused with the complete and utter hatred of Libertarianism on this website. There was a period of time when I considered myself 100% libertarian and now realize that I only need “borrow” some of its components as some things are just not possible. That being said, you say there is no hope for our educational system, I agree overall. However the model of free choice when it comes to schooling is still a better option than none at all (which is where your article seems to just give up and say, it’s over). It doesn’t solve ALL the problems as you point out, but surely it solves some of the problems?? Absolutely family and parental involvement make a big difference, as does wealth and genetics, but pointing to one type of change and simply claiming it would fail seems absurd. School choice would cause things to change, how about arguing those resulting changes out to their logical conclusions? It will take multiple changes probably all at once to at least stop the boat from going down the falls, for instance uncoiling the standardized testing system alongside allowing students to be mobile. Surely, that’s better than just giving up and saying we’re doomed? 11 paragraphs and only one deals with an alternative by mentioning vocational schools. As I like to say, reinstate things to allow the nuclear family to flourish again and many of these issues go away over time.On a side note, Libertarians believe fully in the constitution. Does that count as common ground with your beliefs, Z? I’d enjoy an article where you define any common beliefs you share with libertarians.

DeBeers Diamonds #88015 January 24, 2019 9:14 am 39

The Constitution is dead. Numerous federal judges have indicated as such, and they will not enforce any laws viewed as “racist”. When fmr. Circuit Judge Richard Posner can openly denigrate the Constitution without charges of treason, it should clue you in. South African liberals also have this “muh most progressive Constitution in the world” fetish. Indeed, the courts are the only thing the ANC doesn’t have total control over. But when blacks are 80% of the population, its ludicrous to expect the courts to protect Eurocentric concepts of private property.

DeBeers Diamonds #88017 January 24, 2019 9:21 am 10

Read Mr. Posner’s writing here. Posner was the most frequently cited judge outside of the Supreme Court. His impact in legal circles cannot be minimized. Go ahead and try to convince anyone that his words were not treasonous. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2016/06/law-school-professors-need-more-practical-experience.html

James_OMeara #88033 January 24, 2019 10:24 am 3

Your screenname leads me to think you are not really up on the issue. Constitution worship (Judaic sacred scripture) goes along with treating judges as wise rabbis issuing “interpretations.” Real nations (i.e., every other nation, NONE of which has adopted a US-style Judaic Constitution) treat their constitutions as “basic laws” that can be changed as needed by the legislature.

Hoagie #88066 January 24, 2019 11:39 am 21

Our Constitution is dead specifically because the president, legislature and courts decided that it is “basic law” and change it at will. But then that’s the real problem with constitutions and laws in general. Once the society graduates enough Jewish lawyers to “interpret” every “is” “and” or in every law then every law is worthless. At this point every American with common sense realizes the law will be applied according to who the defendant is not any written word.

Corvinus #88428 January 27, 2019 10:07 am 1

No, our Constitution is not dead. There is no “changing at will” the laws, nor is there is “Jewish lawyers interpreting every ‘is’ and ‘and'” taking place.That is like saying that Martin Luther, the 95 Theses guy, was a pedophile without any proof.So, I’ll speak slow for you. Laws are passed by Congress. Each law provides a framework. The laws then provide discretion to the executive departments to fill in the details. The Founding Fathers put this into place. There was nothing nefarious here. Now, Congress set up the courts, which would then be the arbiters as far as if the laws were constitutional. If Congress does not like the ruling, then they can work toward neutering it, either by changing the law or offering a constitutional amendment.

Whitney #88016 January 24, 2019 9:15 am 14

The Constitution is dead

Hoagie #88067 January 24, 2019 11:42 am 19

The Constitution has been dead since Abraham Lincoln decided states that freely joined in a union were never again free to leave it. Imagine if you told leftists you wanted to change the marriage laws so that once one is married no matter how bad the abuse they can never divorce.

bilejones #88136 January 24, 2019 4:40 pm 2

It was dead when Jefferson made the Louisiana Purchase.

Citizen of a Silly Country #88034 January 24, 2019 10:25 am 43

Speaking only for myself, a former libertarian, my “hatred” of libertarians comes from my belief that they are cowards (yes, I was a coward) and have done irreparable harm to their own people, my people.White guys (and libertarianism is a white guy thing) with all the intellectual tools to understand what’s happening choose to hide behind “free markets” instead of standing up for their people. They willfully block their minds from making the simplest, most incredibly obvious connections about genetics/biology and societal outcomes to stay safe and in the good graces of groups who hate them and want their people destroyed.Libertarians are fifth columnist tools of the Left. They steer whites away from the reality of biological differences and the importance of tribe to some fantasy intellectual holding pin where they wait to be slaughtered by the hordes of blacks and browns pouring into their lands.And to answer your question, what’s wrong with wanting free markets, less regulation and limited government? Nothing. But when those ideas are used to trick whites into allowing themselves to become minorities in their own countries and where the new majority will destroy all of those things, the men who extol those ideas become my enemy. They are willful fools.Show me an ethno-nationalist libertarian, and, maybe, we can talk. Small government and free markets are wonderful tools, but they are just that: Tools to build a better for society for your people. Your people, your family, come first.But libertarians don’t believe in a “people.” Individualism above all. What a cold existence. It’s free markets above all in their asperger’s world.Libertarians are the ultimate cowards, fools and betrayers of their own people. That is why I hate them.

King Tut #88059 January 24, 2019 11:24 am 9

I concur. As an ex-lolbertarian myself, I came to the conclusion a few years ago that most of them are autistic to varying degrees. They don’t understand human connection so they think that it is some sort of commie trick. They just want to be left alone to indulge in their yummy foods, toys and pr0n and they naturally assume that everyone else is similarly inclined, or would be if only we can abolish this wicked idea of nations.

Range Front Fault #88173 January 24, 2019 11:15 pm 0

Pharaoh Tut…..interesting….please elaborate and riff on this more so my fish brain can comprende, particularly the human connection/commie trick idea.

Screwtape #88082 January 24, 2019 12:27 pm 1

Yep. Most libertarians I know are terrified of being called out as a racist or a misogynist. So they burrow into their rabbit holes. When confronted with reality that inevitably reveals their sacred beliefs to be purely magical, they launch into all kinds of ivory tower poopytalk about the constitution and free markets. Its pretty much the “moving houses because better schools” meets “let the market decide” while they self-congratulate over the alpha in their 401k and bathe in faux gratitude for the blessings of their gated community.

TomA #88037 January 24, 2019 10:31 am 1

Demonization of “others” is an ancient technique for dehumanizing the enemy such that they can be more easily exterminated if need be. During WWI and II, both sides used propaganda to make the other side’s soldiers appear as immoral barbarians not worthy of common decency or mercy. Hatred is an emotion, not a rational conclusion.

Citizen of a Silly Country #88046 January 24, 2019 10:56 am 29

In a war for survival, hatred is rational and a needed tool.

Hoagie #88069 January 24, 2019 11:54 am 14

I hear ya, TomA. As a white, Christian man i can feel the dehumanizing every time I see leftists protesting against my country, demanding I let illegals in and every time they talk down to me or accuse me of their litany of BS insults. I felt dehumanized watching a bunch if Black Israelites calling a group of kids debasing names then watching as the left Media and their vibrant “experts” took sides with the anti white racist blacks. Yes, you are correct TomA.

TomA #88111 January 24, 2019 2:34 pm 5

Emotions are transient, and hatred is only useful if you’re trying to form a mob. If you wish to build a lasting movement (or lead an army), you need more than emotions. The media today is wantonly sowing anger rather than informing and educating. That is why they have no credibility anymore. They’re just cheerleaders for a mob of maniacs.

Citizen of a Silly Country #88127 January 24, 2019 3:44 pm 6

Emotions are with us every second of every day. Hatred can be a very lasting emotion. There are peoples who have hated other peoples for hundreds of years.Letting hatred take over your life can be debilitating, but using justified hatred to improve yourself – and possibly harm those who have harmed you or your family – can be a very positive thing.Hatred can be a motivator for good or bad. Hatred of oppressors can lead to movements that free a people. Is that bad? Hatred of a school yard bully can lead a young man to lift weights, learn to fight and to gain huge amounts of self-confidence as well kicking the shit out some asshole. Is that bad?Hatred of my enemies may save my future grandchildren from becoming helots to blacks and browns. Is that bad

TomA #88138 January 24, 2019 4:42 pm 0

I agree that hatred can be a powerful motivator in many things (some good and some bad), and it also can lead to long term grudges and feuds. The Irish Troubles were most certainly founded on such a hatred and great misery flowed from that. I would argue that (more often than not) negative emotions get in the way of sound thinking and decision-making, and ultimately erode one’s soul.

Citizen of a Silly Country #88147 January 24, 2019 6:04 pm 6

True. But fear of hatred or hating some one or some group that that has harmed you, your family or your people can be just as dangerous.When some one or some group is trying to harm – or completely destroy – you, your family or your people, hate is exactly the right emotion.Whites have been taught that it’s wrong to hate – ever. That’s wrong. Hatred can be exactly the right feeling and can push you to do what needs to be done to protect yourself, your family or your people.So long as that enemy exists and continues to want to harm you, your family or your people, hatred remains not only the correct emotion but a necessary emotion.I proudly hate that which seeks to destroy what I love. That form of hatred does not erode one’s soul.

LineInTheSand #88158 January 24, 2019 7:53 pm 6

It was not part of their blood,It came to them very late,With long arrears to make good,When the Saxon began to hate. http://www.europeanamericansunited.org/school1/Fiction/kipling/awakened.htm

Guest #88049 January 24, 2019 11:07 am 9

I hate libertarians because they suffer from the same deluded refusal to accept objective reality as socialists or communists. Press any socialist or communist on why socialists countries across the globe are poverty-stricken hellholes and they will ulitmately respond earnestly that nobody has implemented socialism/communism properly yet. Similarly, ask any libertarian why libertarian policies have failed and they will tell you that it hasn’t been implemented correctly.At some point you have to face the fact that the consistent, repeated failure of your political philosophy means that there is a flaw in your philosophy.The sentence in your comment that most clearly encapsulates the reason we hate libertarians is: “As I like to say, reinstate things to allow the nuclear family to flourish again and many of these issues go away over time.” You can’t seriously believe this? Afghanistan and Bangladesh are far more supportive of nuclear familes than America. Surely they must be utopia.

DLS #88051 January 24, 2019 11:14 am 1

The basic flaw in your argument is not realizing this is a zero sum game. When you pull out the best blacks from the inner city, what’s left gets even worse. I am all for freedom of choice to send your kids where you want, if they qualify. But it’s not going to make a dent in the problem.

Compsci #88078 January 24, 2019 12:18 pm 2

DLS, perhaps. But when the schools with the dregs collapse utterly, does that not bode for a rethinking and a new model of thought wrt Education? Especially when alternatives (alternative schools) shine brightly in their contrast? One can hope. In the meantime, all folk—White and Minority—deserve an alternative to dying on a Leftist cross of ideology.

c matt #88085 January 24, 2019 12:28 pm 7

The key to the success of alternative schools/magnet programs is that they are not mandatory. You can be excluded, so they only take the cream of the crop. In short, they can discipline. Your average public school has lost most of the power to discipline, so naturally things run wild.

Alzaebo #88095 January 24, 2019 1:00 pm 2

To his credit, the Zman nails it on “vo-tech, or breeders”.

hokkoda #88152 January 24, 2019 6:45 pm 7

As Zman likes to point out, I’m an example of a guy who flirted with Libertarianism until I figured out that most of Libertarianism is b.s. The local chapter, so to speak, would have luncheons and speakers talking about public-private partnerships, cue eye-roll. That’s just a taxpayer money grab. They’d have the principal “reformer” at a local school come in and talk about how tough it is for the teachers…but the guy wasn’t reforming anything. It just made them feel good.And while I’m deep in the minority of people who think pot legalization was a BAD IDEA in Colorado, and that it has failed, I can look to the state’s Libertarians and remind them that the idea of legalizing pot in order to raise tax revenues for schools in order to expand government power…was all their fricking idea. Yeah, that’s right, we’re gonna limit government power by giving the government more money and more power. And we’re going to replace drug smuggling crimes in Colorado with huge problems of drug manufacturing in the suburbs. Every 2-3 months we have another huge bust because the cartels are buying up pot grow licenses and putting them in nice suburban neighborhoods. Thanks for the SWAT Teams, Libertarians! Never thought I’d see those in my neighborhood!That’s when I realized that Libertarians, in practice, are simply Liberals who don’t like paying income taxes.

Karl Horst Germany #88104 January 24, 2019 1:54 pm 15

I met a young American college student in a small town outside Amsterdam over the Christmas holidays. I was surprised to hear an American accent as you don’t often near Americans in that particular part of the Netherlands at that time of year given it is a more rural area. You’re more likely to find a farmer than tourist.Turns out he’s studying “Construction Management” from a university in Colorado (forgive me if I forget the school’s name) and he graduates this spring. I was curious about his education, what he paid for it and if he thought it was worth what he paid for it.He told me the first two years were a complete waste of time with classes like music appreciation, and art. Then when I asked him to describe what this degree would give him in the way of a real job skill he was a bit embarrassed and said “Everything I’ve learned in the past two years, with the exception of some math and physics, I could have learned on the job.” When I asked him what it cost, he told me all together it was around $90,000. I was stunned! He told me because his family is already involved in the construction business, he could work summers and earn enough to graduate debt free, but most people in his class were up to their necks in debt.His father is a carpenter and his uncle is also a construction tradesman and they build housing projects around the Denver area. From what he explained, the only reason he pursued a degree was to have, as he called it “…a piece of paper that said he graduated so he’d have an advantage over the guy who didn’t.” When I questioned him further about the core curriculum, it seems most of the so called ‘college courses’ were nothing more than high-priced technical school programs. He learned a little about a lot of things, but not enough to do be qualified to really do anything.I’ve heard similar stories from other young American’s I’ve run into here in Europe. I get the impression American colleges and Universities have become nothing more than trade schools that in the end, really don’t prepare anyone to do anything – and charge a ridiculous price for the pleasure of sitting in their class rooms.

TomA #88117 January 24, 2019 2:49 pm 8

The university education system in the US operates primarily as an indoctrination center for mush-minded adolescents, and is intended to inculcate Leftist ideals. In order to ensure success at this, the students are seduced into becoming debt slaves so that future Democrat politicians can buy their vote by offering debt relief. In reality, these institutions just warehouse juveniles during their hormonal years and delay the maturation process that normally occurs when you have to work for a living.

Maus #88131 January 24, 2019 4:14 pm 7

The problem with this kid from Colorado, and many of the nihilistic strivers of the Millennial generation, is his failure to grasp that those art and music classes he found a waste of time will be the true education that separates him from the proles he’ll manage at the construction site. He ought to at least have opinions on the aesthetics of a Rembrandt painting (why else visit the Netherlands?) or a Bach concerto. I’ll give odds that the Mexican tile layer or the redneck roofer won’t even know who those worthies are.

Teapartydoc #88142 January 24, 2019 5:08 pm 6

Anecdotal experience is not worth much. In America you can get any kind of education you want to. And as long as you meet entrance requirements you can get that education at a tremendous variety of venues. Having this tremendous variety means that it cannot be offered at government expense. You have to pay for it, unless you are offered a scholarship.I was a rather poor high school student, so no scholarships were available to me. If I was German, I doubt if I would have even qualified for university. As things turned out I double majored in biology and chemistry, and after I graduated the biology department looked at the way I had designed my own curriculum and designed a new degree out of it. Two of my sons went to public school, one of whom doubled in history and classical studies on a scholarship, and the other went to a top business school and paid through the nose. The third was homeschooled, and went to engineering school on scholarship, despite having little formal education.I’ve said it before. Our education system beats the pants off of anything in the world at the top end, but we have a lot of low quality stuff at the low end.Because there is a high volume of the low end stuff, this is what the casual observer is most likely to see. And I guess it isn’t too surprising for many to think that that is all there is.We aren’t the best country in the world for no reason.

Compsci #88208 January 25, 2019 11:12 am 2

Teaparty, the low end is not so much institutions as students. In even the best US Universities, there is a contingent—sometimes large—of students who really should not be in University. Horst won’t know this because he comes from a society where students are tracked early into those who can “succeed” (read, make good use of) in a University setting and those who would be better off in a trade school or work study program. And of course, it follows that the State can therefore afford to pay for a student’s Univerisity education as the cost/benefit is in line with societal goals.

Jack Boniface #88041 January 24, 2019 10:34 am 15

1. School choice — vouchers — was libertarian Milton Friedman’s dumb idea from “Capitalism and Freedom.” What it really does is put govt. in charge of private schools. The same thing already happened to private colleges that accepted govt. cash. Who pays the piper calls the tune. 2. “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” I love it when a post ends insulting Buckley Conservatives.

Larkin Lover #88077 January 24, 2019 12:14 pm 5

Right. Then when everyone can afford to go to any private school, the government sticks its nose in and says “why don’t the demographics of this school reflect the race percentages of this city or state? “ Then there will be no safe haven!Or only for ridiculously expensive schools.

Maus #88092 January 24, 2019 12:48 pm 14

The simple fact is that the majority of Americans are trying to reconcile two unspeakable truths that are fundamentally irreconcilable. The first is that some people are more intelligent (and amenable to education) than others; so equality is nonsensical. The second is that in a post-agricultural and post-industrial society such as we have in 21st century America, there is no need for the labor of hordes of stupid people. Many on the left side of the bell curve have no meaningful contribution to make. Thus, society faces stark choices. Either we collectively provide for the material needs of these useless eaters by dispossessing the resources of the shrinking productive segment of society; or the problem is solved by a mass die-off accelerated by the traditional causes of war, famine, plague, or the intentional practice of genocide. Both choices are horrific. Winter is coming …

Herman Snerd #88154 January 24, 2019 7:14 pm 9

I like your “two unspeakable truths” and in the main agree with you. However, the garbage man and the plumber, whose work will never appear in any university curriculum, are [hardly useless] and in fact are of more use than most white collar drones who spend a lifetime pushing paper from one desk to the next.

BadThinker #88380 January 26, 2019 9:50 pm 0

Many garbage men these days are truck drivers, the truck does most of the work. Automation is coming for them too… until the self-driving garbage truck crushes some poor child who was hiding in the trash can.

BadThinker #88379 January 26, 2019 9:48 pm 0

I like legalized drugs for some of those folks. Pot in particular to keep ’em docile. And if we could lace it with some kind of birth control that works on inhaling it…

TomA #88030 January 24, 2019 10:17 am 13

Schooling cannot change native intelligence, but in can inculcate behaviors, especially during the early formative years. This indoctrination used to be focused on wisdom transfer, and was fundamentally about continued survival. Later, with the advent of civilization, it morphed into cultural and moral teaching, and was primarily about minimizing the non-conformism and chaos that caused social friction. Today, it’s used an instrument of memetic infection to inculcate “approved” beliefs (ideas more so than behaviors). The Left has seized control over education as an instrument of exercising power and growing their ranks. That is the core problem.

GU1 #88109 January 24, 2019 2:24 pm 3

In short, we need more “Tom Brown’s School Days” and less poz.

Based Millennial #88019 January 24, 2019 9:45 am 13

It will take the equivalent of an intellectual or actual revolution to overturn the paradigm. The current paradigm is egalitarianism, which was born from the Enlightment. What we are seeing now is the logical conclusion after two centuries of slowly imposing progressive thought.Most people are steeped and marinated in it because they believe that they can create a utopia through their brainpower and also because the fact that we are not inherently equal is too terrible for people to contemplate. We have gone from everyone having equal worth to everyone being theoretically equal (which in a way was to preserve their self-worth).The Revolution though will probably be very hard to implement in the US as our very founding in based off of Enlightment philosophy. Such a revolution would negate the very image of America based on its beginnings.

williamwilliams #88043 January 24, 2019 10:43 am 7

>>>The Revolution though will probably be very hard to implement in the US…. Any significant “revolution” is impossible in the USA, until real economic hardship comes to most of the population. Fortunately, we’re getting there. The sooner, the better.

mr. incredible #88110 January 24, 2019 2:27 pm 1

When will the debt bubble pop?

Compsci #88081 January 24, 2019 12:27 pm 1

There are lots of good—and well educated—people out there who would go into such a valued profession as teaching, once we return to sanity wrt students and educational outcomes.

Gun Bangley #88048 January 24, 2019 11:03 am 12

Oh, if it were only three generations.

Carl B. #88022 January 24, 2019 10:00 am 12

“Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” More imbeciles are on the way. Both Domestic and Imported. All hail our Dear Leader, Kamala!

Outis #88055 January 24, 2019 11:19 am 11

This: “vocational schools and the availability of jobs for people on the left side of the curve is the answer” Everyone must go to college was the dumbest initiative of our lifetimes. It’s harmed more people than it’s benefited.

DLS #88065 January 24, 2019 11:38 am 14

We shipped the lower class jobs to China, while convincing those who used to do them that they were too good for these jobs anyway. Then we pressured them to waste a fortune on college for no discernible benefit. What could go wrong?

Drake #88029 January 24, 2019 10:16 am 11

I’ve paid for “school choice” for some of the benefits Reason talks about (better education) but also for the reasons Z-Man describes: filters, willingness to kick-out trouble-makers of any race, in-your-face Catholicism that keeps stupid progressives quiet.

Lorenzo #88040 January 24, 2019 10:34 am 12

The primary advantage of a private school is that troublemakers can be summarily kicked out. The other stuff is a bonus, but maintaining order makes the rest possible.

JEB #88027 January 24, 2019 10:14 am 11

Biology matters, but it isn’t the only thing that matters. Culture also matters. It really is true that many black students disdain academic effort because they see it as “acting white,” and that’s something that at least in theory could be changed.Ironically, this is an argument for school segregation! Children tend to really like doing whatever it is that they are best at relative to their peers. I was too short to be good at basketball, so I’ve never had much interest in the sport and certainly never made any effort to get better at it. But I had the right body type for other sports, and hey, I put alotof effort into those. Black students in an integrated school are going to notice that the whites are generally smarter, while they themselves are generally better at being rowdy troublemakers, so they are going to be pulled in that direction. But in an all black school the best students are going to be black, and those students at least will get some reward for applying themselves to their studies. Native intelligence may not be changeable, but attitude is, and everybody would be better off if blacks somehow picked up a better attitude.

DLS #88062 January 24, 2019 11:29 am 2

I think you have the cause/effect backwards. The attitude follows the deficiency, not the other way around.

Compsci #88093 January 24, 2019 12:50 pm 3

JEB your argument appears sound, except that much of the trouble/deficiency is in basically all Black schools. There are no superior white students to be jealous of in those. What I see (as you do mainly) is a response to just not being able to hack an academic course of study and a behavioral inclination to gain status through disruption. In this case, alternatives need to be found for such students. That brings us back to discipline. Get rid of the bad apples to save the few good students or take the few good students out (Charter schools) and baby sit the bad apples until it’s time for them to go to jail.

bilejones #88023 January 24, 2019 10:04 am 10

Conflating Reason magazine with libertarianism is like conflating the NY Times with journalism. Just because they say so doesn’t make it so.

Drake #88024 January 24, 2019 10:08 am 9

They went way off the rails a few years ago. There was always a tendency to ignore the logical consequences of some of their bad ideas like open borders. Now it’s just leftist BS in the face of any facts they don’t like.

thezman #88025 January 24, 2019 10:11 am 26

There was always a divide between left-libertarianism and right-libertarianism. The former is the mainstream of libertarianism now. The latter has mostly dissolved into the dissident right. If you want anything like a libertarian society, you start with biology, then culture and then the rest becomes possible.

Red Forman #88038 January 24, 2019 10:32 am 14

We are naturally socialists with our immediate family and libertarians with our extended family. Both systems work and sustain peace and prosperity, in their proper spheres. The folly is in trying to superimpose those relationships onto other groups. Unfortunately, somewhere along the line, we forgot the proper systems for community and nation.

Libertymike #88039 January 24, 2019 10:32 am -4

Most libertarians do not buy tabula raza and they thoroughly reject the proposition that all men and all women and all trannies are born equal.Do you think the likes of Hoppe, Prof. DiLorenzo, and Tom Woods embrace the blank slate? Do you think Rothbard did? Speaking of Woods, your boy, Audacious Epigone, is apparently a fan.If you read some of the comments on the Reason piece to which you linked, you will find some posters who objected, including some who accurately observed that those who think government can educate children are lunatics. That is the real magic dust: the state will make us wicked smart.Your hatred of libertarianism is irrational. Are you afraid of competition? Are you afraid of free enterprise? Are you a busybody? Do you yearn for a strong man, a Lincoln, a Roosevelt, a Mussolini, a Chavez, to come and save the day?Were you bullied by libertarians? Did a libertarian steal your girl away from you?

Compsci #88090 January 24, 2019 12:40 pm 4

There may be a hatred of Libertarians expressed here, but there sure seem to be a lot of EX Lib’s on the forum—myself included. I do not take offense. I take from Libertarianism that which works and discard the rest. And before you criticize Zman further, note that he’s got the history pretty correct: I was a “Right” Libertarian for 20 years, now I am a “Dissident Right” member.

Drake #88098 January 24, 2019 1:07 pm 2

I was a Barry Goldwater Libertarian. Still am on most issues,

Sleepy #88060 January 24, 2019 11:25 am 4

Derb recently speculated on whether he was really the coiner of the “dissident right” label, so I did some internet searches and (spoiler alert) it is pretty clear that he did. At any rate, during those searches I found an interesting article from 2007 that discusses the demise of Fusionism and the related move of right libertarians to what would become the dissident (and alt) right. (The author uses the words “dissident” and “right” in succession, but not as a coined term…) https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-failure-of-fusionism/ BTW, the article also pretty accurately adumbrates Trumpism, though not, of course, Trump.

thezman #88075 January 24, 2019 12:08 pm 9

I know I picked up the term from Derb. That said, I take some credit for popularizing it. Therefore, i demand some portion of his royalties. I accept cash, booze and bitcoin.

Sleepy #88088 January 24, 2019 12:34 pm 2

Would you settle for the chair of the Purity Council when Czar Derb opens his Inquisition after the revolution? BTW, for those reading along, here is the article where he coined the term: https://vdare.com/articles/john-derbyshire-who-are-we-the-dissident-right …and a couple of examples of the reaction of the screeching Left immediately after: https://gawker.com/5910087/john-derbyshire-comes-out-of-the-white-supremacist-closethttps://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/15/john-derbyshire-latest-racist-rant_n_1518815.html (Before this time virtually all of the few uses of “dissident right” that I found were references to European politics.)

Range Front Fault #88177 January 25, 2019 12:11 am 1

Grape or grain? Or box wine swiped from some bluehaired crophaired cat lady shrieking!

A.B. Prosper #88146 January 24, 2019 5:54 pm 3

The US has never been a Libertarian society . We’ve censored books, prohibited pornographic images , restricted arms , restricted drugs , prohibited gambling and prostitution and all manor of vices, adultery, birth control and homosexuality was illegal I could go on.Hell those natural libertarians went to the trouble to amend our Constitution to legally eliminate alcohol at the Federal levelAt no point does any of this qualify as Libertarian and it appears no one wants that kind of society at all.In fact given weed is legal , guns are mostly legal in most places, gambling is legal. adultery is legal , booze is everywhere and while taxed too much I can still but a cheap cigar , even our TV is less censored by the StatesIf anything we are more Libertarian than we’ve been at any point in the industrial age and more than we’ve been in a century or more .This isn’t working and when people can’t handle freedom, maybe the answer is not giving them more of it.A ten year old can handle a .22 but an .40 caliber SMG? Not so muchI suspect what Libertarians at least on the Right want is unfettered commerce no matter what the consequences to society at largeI think this is because they don’t believe society exists beyond the individual and maybe his family and they think if they could just use child labor in the cat litter mines and not clean up the waste they too could be richThat not true. . People only matter in context and while the Individual has great value without a culture, a people, traditions and customs, that value cannot be expressed in any meaningful wayThis means that the job of the State is to preserve society and its customs and land in this age of “rule by pirates” as you wisely put it , this means controlling businessesFrankly though its made big mistakes I’m glad for this control remember when air was polluted and while a bit before my time. rivers that caught on fire , water was undrinkable and worse.This doesn’t mean Communism is a good idea or that there isn’t room for reform but a healthy society with a long term future comes at a cost in money and maybe the choices people can make. The Libertarian desire to avoid that cost cannot be allowed as policy.The Right Dissident and other can’t allow Libertarian Thinking which is little more than Leftism without business regulation to make policy. A proper Right is much more like Europe, traditionalist, preservationist and protective of traditional freedoms not freedom per se.

Someone #88454 January 27, 2019 6:37 pm 0

Right-libertarianism has morphed into Propertarianism.

David_Wright #88014 January 24, 2019 9:11 am 9

Libertarianism is now a catchall for not republican or democrat. The Reason crowd are truly an austistic bunch beyond redemption. Your statement “ Once you take the egalitarian pill, the world stops making sense. From there it is an endless search for the right set of policies to make everyone equal.” In a nutshell the reason we have and always will have the screwed up society and political system.

BadThinker #88116 January 24, 2019 2:45 pm 0

No one isbeyondredemption. But one can get pretty close.

JMDGT #88011 January 24, 2019 9:05 am 9

In all honesty I cannot describe myself as anything other than being a realist. Not libertarian or conservative definitely not progressive or socialist. I just want to be free to ride my machine and not be hassled by the man. Heads up. Helmets on. Gear up gentlemen. We still have work to do.

JR Wirth #88118 January 24, 2019 2:55 pm 8

Nature over nurture is so abhorrent to our national culture that it’s literally unspeakable. Which is why I frequent this blog.If you look at the counties that Ron Paul won during a primary six or seven years ago, they were nearly all 99% rural white counties that are clustered near the Canadian border. So it appears that libertarianism only has a shot in rural white America that’s too cold for Maria and Sheniqua. So of course choosing between a high school that’s composed of Kyle and Amy from across the street, vs, Kyle and Amy from across town, it’s not a bad option. Same hockey moms, same ugly sweaters.As a resident of CA, where my tribe is now 1/3 and dying fast, I know very well the dangers of “school choice.” This is one of the few states that’s not as open to it and for good reason.Of course, don’t tell Conservative Inc., which, much like liberals from the 1970’s, think, if only Tyrone had the right environment, he would be the next Walter Williams. That’s mainstream politics today, 1970’s liberals vs 2019 liberals. It’s just a mop up operation.

Alzaebo #88086 January 24, 2019 12:31 pm 8

Before reading the comments, I know some brilliant person is going to tell me Somalia is libertarian. No. Somalia is full of Somalis.Libertarianism only works in lighter societies. Blank slate vibrancy has ruined libertarianism.What Libertarianism needs, is Whiteness.

Alzaebo #88091 January 24, 2019 12:47 pm 1

Wouldn’t proper libertarianism include freedom of association, speech, self-defense? Self-defense as the right to knock the sh*t out of disruptive azzholes, whether vibrant, proggy, or corrupt. Most especially the corrupt.Even right-wing azzholes who will turn their guns and laws on their own, to support the corrupt.

BadThinker #88123 January 24, 2019 3:23 pm 7

A Libertarian white society is also impossible because there are lots of sociopathic high-achieving whites. Example – Every CEO and Board Member of the fortune 500. 13th century Venice is an example of what a white society can be when the only values that matter are transactions – slave galleys and the rule of cash above all else.

Teapartydoc #88140 January 24, 2019 4:45 pm 2

The Venetians never used slaves on galleys. They did conscript prisoners, but these rowed alongside guys being paid the regular rate and getting better food. Some of the conscripted were even allowed to share in the profits of the voyage like the regular rowers. One of the big problems with using them was that they were notoriously bad fighters, as rowers sometimes had to act as marines.

BadThinker #88174 January 24, 2019 11:36 pm 1

Early on, they did not. But as they grew more powerful they most certainly did, and they also operated large slave markets (but not on Venice proper). By the late 16th century many Venetian galleys were slave-rowed. So technically, yes, the galley slavery came a bit later than the 13th century as I suggested. The trade in slaves, however, was there pretty much from the start. At Lepanto, I believe that the Christian fleets struck the chains from most of the non-muslim galley slaves, however, unlike the Ottoman fleets.

A.B. Prosper #88124 January 24, 2019 3:26 pm 3

Libertarianism doesn’t work anywhere although a “mind your own business” ethos is fine in an undeveloped frontier.Once a society reaches a certain level of complexity, population density and/or technology or has dangerous neighbors the Libertarian ethos is not only useless but dangerousThere is a reason there has never been any Libertarian societies, they don’t work and invariably collapse into oligrachyNote even medieval Iceland which would seem to be the place for such a society had a complex legal code and strict laws on what could be said or written to avoid open feudsIn a world where is getting to be easy to engineer weapon grade microbes at home or its increasingly feasible to weaponize mosquitoes to mutate millions people with a homemade virus, or just posion a salad bar with near untreatable disease as happened and Chipotle someone has to regulate and that someone is the stateWant antibiotics to work? Big ag must be controlled and no private party can do this effectivelyThis does not mean the state can’t guarantee rights or a subset of them for its members, any functioning state can do this , Feudalism is entirely built around this concept as was in theory though not in reality, CommunismOn an American level, the Bill of Rights can be maintained easily enough if people try and the courts are managed however people cannot have unlimited freedom with just “civil liability” this doesn’t workA lot of things, how children are treated, chemicals disposed of, land is used and such requires State.Worse for Libertarians, the more automation and computers we have the more State we’ll have. Not only does this make Big Gov more feasible but as automation reduces wages, people turn to the State to get byThey aren’t selling out their precious liberty , starvation and poverty aren’t freedom and the net effect of this is every time a restaurant installs a kiosk they have efficiently gone and voted for Liberal DemocratDon’t want President Ocasio Cortez ? Make sure there are plenty of good jobs for all skill levels and that the national wealth is shared among workersOtherwise people will vote for very little over nothing or just in spite alone.

Teapartydoc #88135 January 24, 2019 4:40 pm 6

Libertarianism was a bus stop on the road to race realism.

Ryan #88074 January 24, 2019 12:08 pm 8

Excellent point about the left hand of the bell curve needing a role in the economy. There’s a handful of bloggers who call themselves “alt-left,” basically liberals who accept HBD. They’ve been talking about this problem for years, what does a liberal/hippie/compassionate society do to help the biologically disadvantaged play a meaningful role in society. They seem to have no idea, but at least they’re asking a useful question.

Compsci #88204 January 25, 2019 10:56 am 1

Ryan, it is the essential question. Good point. The concept of an “adequate” IQ is a relative one and a moving target in today’s society. We should not think that we are talking about folks with (for example) 90 or below IQ. In a decade or two, it will be folks with an average (100) IQ that are unemployed due to lack of jobs. Ask the now threatened 8+M long haul truckers. Folks need jobs, not welfare. A society wth too many idle hands is dangerous one.

James_OMeara #88032 January 24, 2019 10:20 am 8

Monstrous? Yes. Never happen? Nonsense. That’s exactly what happened to me. Unfortunately, I was the twin who got to live with the Dullards. As Howard Stern would say, it would have been better to have been raised by wolves.

thezman #88042 January 24, 2019 10:37 am 7

But it was not part of a longitudinal study of pedagogy. Just bad luck, but a good example of how nature triumphs over nurture.

Alzaebo #88105 January 24, 2019 2:01 pm 1

I thank you, personally, Zman, for those kind words. Monstrous. Monstrous. Unimaginable. Poor singletons, you are the damned, you cannot possibly know what we know. James O’Meara, nothing has shaken me as has this. Nothing.The fools! What they have taken!!

LeafyGreen #88232 January 25, 2019 9:31 pm 0

There WAS a longitudinal study. I would even argue that there still is, considering breakneck speed of legalized human trafficking. (adoptions)In the 1960’s, (by jewish Louise Wise Adoption Agency), children were separated from their identical siblings and placed in adoptive homes where they were studied under the guise of “visits.” Their adoptive families were never told of the existence of siblings so that nature vs. nurture could be studied in its purest form.Study results have been locked up at Yale, 61 boxes of data, yet those individuals are not privy to their own histories until the year 2066 when most will be gone. Only the Jewish Board has the authority to release the information to those individuals who were placed in a research study without their knowledge and pulled from the siblings who they never knew existed.The documentary, “Three Identical Strangers” (2018), even shows some of the evil participants to this scheme. One of them kissing Barak Obama. (Nobody was able to sue these psychopaths yet.) There are still adoptees from the study, who are not informed of their twin, or not even aware that they are adopted. (All adoptees have FAKE birth certificates)

Range Front Fault #88178 January 25, 2019 12:21 am 1

Kudos to you! Actually not shocked to hear. Heard of this ghastly experimenting before. Good for you to work your way out of the hole. Respect that! You’re made of solid stuff. You have some serious teaching stories stored away.

UKer #88036 January 24, 2019 10:27 am 7

I have said this before, but having done some teaching I know that a lot depends on the student him(or her)self, irrespective of the system. No matter what I said or tried to show, no matter what ‘teaching methodology’ was employed, or what the current theories about teaching ideas were enthused about, it was down to the student to make sense of it all. They themselves had to have a spark in them, and needed to employ some sort of effort.Where that spark came from, how much effort they were willing to make was beyond any teacher’s reach.Add to that the fact that most students now have computers, and would rather play Call-Of-Whack-A-Mole than learn, then it was often an uphill struggle get them to focus on anything. However given the profusion of information on the ‘net on any subject, they all became adept at cut and paste even if they had no idea what they were cutting and pasting, or why.

Dutch #88057 January 24, 2019 11:20 am 10

I taught the equivalent of high school in a strict British school in Hampshire (a very wealthy place) in the Margaret Thatcher days. The tight structure and heavy discipline worked for some of the students, and completely failed other bright, promising kids. My conclusion was that the biggest failing of the system, was in the parents and the educators not working diligently to pick and choose the proper educational environments for each student, one by one.In our public school system, the primacy of geography and quotas in determining where kids go to school, and the absolute prohibition of freedom of association in choosing a child’s educational environment, is a criminal thing.

Teapartydoc #88134 January 24, 2019 4:27 pm 6

I was one of those fish out of water kids in high school. Graduated in the bottom half of my class. Got saved by standardized testing. Without that I wouldn’t have qualified for college. As it was I got invited. Teachers all knew I was smart, but had no idea what to do with me.

Sleepy #88021 January 24, 2019 9:57 am 7

The school aged population in and around the Imperial Capital is ~30% white and 10% Asian, so only in the schools in the wealthiest pockets have a majority of students who are academically capable and motivated. This issue is solved through tracking programs, e.g., IB, AP, etc., and limited school choice to access these types of programs.The calculus depends on there being enough students in a given school to sustain such programs and on the rest of the students being a small enough percentage of the student body to avoid chaos outside the classroom.The shame of it, at least as I have observed, is that the egalitarian ethos keeps the education system, as the Z Man says, from developing programs for those on the left side of the bell curve. High school for them seems more like a holding pen to bore them and keep them off the streets until they are 18.

Dr. Dre #88229 January 25, 2019 8:11 pm 1

Saw TN’s “Promise Program” in action yesterday at a private college nr. Nashville. 2 yrs free education. Not a good thing.

Severian #88115 January 24, 2019 2:44 pm 6

In college I called myself a Libertarian. It meant “I have some problems with Liberal cant, but I still want to score with easy Lefty girls.” Sex is a very underrated element of politics, in my opinion — as the Heartiste types keep pointing out, MAGA hat girls are generally orders of magnitude better looking than pussyhatters. We’re not doing a very good job of capitalizing on that.

A.B. Prosper #88125 January 24, 2019 3:28 pm 7

A lot of us are married, not much point in that Also are movement such as it is rightly feels young women should marry and have children not gallivant around being .Alt Right Thots

BadThinker #88382 January 26, 2019 9:55 pm 0

Not only is it desperately necessary if the west is to survive, it’s much better for the women too. Somehow humans reached the current era after thousands of years without many female engineers, scientists, warriors, etc. But we’d all be dead without mothers and the makers of homes. In a way, the disaster that befell women was a result of the industrial revolution eliminating so much of women’s work.

roo_ster #88080 January 24, 2019 12:24 pm 5

If you want to burst delusions of egalitarianism, read Martin van Creveld’s “Equaity: The Impossible Quest.”https://www.amazon.com/Equality-Impossible-Martin-van-Creveld-ebook/dp/B00UVLE20W/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1548350444&sr=8-1&keywords=creveld+equalityThis book was not THE thing that red-pilled me, but it helped to further destroy any egalitarian delusions I once had.

Vegetius #88031 January 24, 2019 10:19 am 5

Thought on strategy: We must wedge the left apart while eliminating libertarian and conservative alternatives to nationalism.

Vegetius #88044 January 24, 2019 10:52 am 2

The 30,000 or so libertarians who actually affected the outcome of Senate elections in 2018 wear cowboy hats and baseball caps, not fedoras.

Vegetius #88050 January 24, 2019 11:14 am 2

These people don’t read Reason. They tend to live in areas where school choice is not an issue. How are these folks to be approached and brought over?

Mike Walsh #88028 January 24, 2019 10:15 am 5

Simpler explanation: Libertarians are basically adolescents.

Teapartydoc #88133 January 24, 2019 4:19 pm 1

See: LibertyMike.

Saurons_Lazy_Eye #88083 January 24, 2019 12:28 pm 4

The other twin is ripped from his parents and placed in a home with high parental investment and access to school choice. Then maybe you could get some useful data. That’s monstrous and no one would ever agree to anything close to it, so it will never happen.Oddly enough, just a few minutes after reading that, I came across the following post in the comments to a postelsewhere:“In grad school, I had a flaming liberal adjunct instructor of child development. Our textbook contained a study of M[entally] R[etarded] children who had randomly been placed in one of two groups, A and B.Group A had the participants assigned to foster families for the duration of their lives, while Group B was to be institutionalized in state psychiatric hospitals, also for the duration of their lives.After 5 years, both groups were reevaluated and the results published. Group A had shown marked improvement in the ability to function as an adult in our society, but Group B had shown a marked downturn in functional ability. IQ`s for the groups followed the study, with A showing improvement, and B had scores heading downward.In my mind, 5 years was the time to switch the group living quarters. B to foster homes and A institutions. Seemed like a fair way to decide what type of program to institute in the future.The snot nosed adjunct fought me tooth and nail, repeating time and time again that a ‘longitudinal study was needed to certify the results.’She flat out dismissed my concerns about wasting the lives of Group B, then delivered the statement that made this bastardization of research great (in her mind) ‘These participants were chosen because they had no family members who could question their participation.’I saw red and did tell her, ‘So that makes it right? What if one of the B group members was YOU?’ She responded, ‘Well, I was not part of the study!'”So I guess this woman would like to carry out the sort of research you propose (as long as she could have gotten away with it). Also,Psammetichuswould have approved.

Dale Peterson #88052 January 24, 2019 11:15 am 4

Excellent closing sentence!

sirlancelot #88168 January 24, 2019 9:54 pm 2

Inner city schools are the state penitentiaries waiting room. Lived through forced busing . Mandated integration doesn’t work. Keep your children out of the zoo.

Samuel_Adams #88160 January 24, 2019 8:38 pm 2

I tried to browse through the comments for quite a ways but saw nothing that portrays an even uglier truth about education.If I remember correctly, “The Bell Curve” did a study of an affluent suburb of Cleveland that was disproportionally populated with Blacks. These citizens were doctors, teachers, professionals all. One would think their offspring would follow in their footsteps…having such a comfortable upbringing by intelligent parents. The unfortunate reality, however, was that the ethnic culture was stronger than family. Their children, in a single generation, seemed intent on following the worst vices and turning their nose up at “education”. They apparently didn’t see the benefit their parents were providing.This why you see so many Asian students fighting to get into elite colleges. Not only do they have wise parents who are willing to sacrifice for them, but their culture values knowledge and rewards hard work. They use schools to acquire training and knowledge…whereas too many others see schools as a guaranteed ticket to a better life. Whether or not they apply themselves and learn what they will need to know.

LineInTheSand #88164 January 24, 2019 9:18 pm 2

The offspring of outliers usually regress to the mean. Culture is not nothing, but it’s usually much less important than biology.

Din C. Nuffin #88157 January 24, 2019 7:52 pm 2

Speaking as a productive (tax paying) Caucasian, are the prisons overcrowded? I much prefer paying for more prisons for maladaptive citizens, than welfare for the same group. The stick works better than the carrot on these folks, just as it did on me.

Herman Snerd #88148 January 24, 2019 6:15 pm 2

Zman along with a few others opened my eyes to libertarianism’s fundamental flaw, for which I thank you. Fetishizing liberty, blind to every other consideration, is civilizational suicide.

Dan #88145 January 24, 2019 5:31 pm 2

The left side on the Bell Curve provides votes for the commie lefts “something for nothing” promises. Thus the incentive to reform ANY system that creates this demographic is doomed. Votes and power for politicians will ALWAYS come before anything and everything else.

Arthur_Sido #88122 January 24, 2019 3:18 pm 2

Having blogged for more than a decade, trying to come up with a catchy opening line is always a struggle but that might be the best opener you have offered to date.

BadThinker #88112 January 24, 2019 2:34 pm 2

There was an education post at insty a little bit ago. So much love for school choice and homeschool in the comments, so few folks that recognize the truth. How much longer until the BoomerCons wake up? Will they ever?

Frip #88108 January 24, 2019 2:18 pm 2

This interview with Libertarian John Stossel is a typical example of how they spend their interviews evading questions, playing dumb, or in Stossel’s case, actually being dumb. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lap1DSBrk0

GU1 #88102 January 24, 2019 1:46 pm 2

“Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Holmes was a Progressive. But Progressives were based back then.

JJ Jones #88026 January 24, 2019 10:14 am 2

“is to do a twin study” A group did this, but for different reasons and under unethical conditions (ostensibly for tracking mental illness). See the film ‘Three Identical Strangers’.

Teapartydoc #88130 January 24, 2019 4:06 pm 2

There are a lot of twin studies ongoing. I know because my old employer was involved in them. When they were starting up they got a lot of publicity, in part because that helped them locate subjects. I suspect that they get little publicity these days because the results don’t support the egalitarian suppositions we are expected to hold dear.

Recovering Lawyer #88189 January 25, 2019 8:22 am 1

Z, I’m your acolyte (not really, but you know what I mean), trying to properly interpret your closing sentence. You surely know the source, so are you saying that eugenic selection by our governmental/bureaucratic overlords is the answer to the problem? I hope to hear from you. Thanks.

LeafyGreen #88175 January 24, 2019 11:47 pm 1

Tragically, the MONSTROUS thing had already happened. In the 1960’s, (by Jewish Louise Wise Adoption Agency), children were separated from their identical siblings and placed in adoptive homes where they were studied under the guise of “visits.” Their adoptive families were never told of the existence of siblings so that nature vs. nurture could be studied in its purest form.Study results have been locked up at Yale, 61 boxes of data, yet those individuals are not privy to their own histories until the year 2066 when most will be gone. Only the Jewish Board has the authority to release the information to those individuals who were placed in a research study without their knowledge and pulled from the siblings who they never knew existed.The documentary, “Three Identical Strangers” (2018), even shows some of the evil participants to this scheme. One of them kissing Barak Obama. (Nobody was able to sue these psychopaths yet.) There are still adoptees from the study, who are not informed of their twin, or not even aware that they are adopted. (All adoptees have FAKE birth certificates)Quick search of wealthy jews from NYC area, born in 1966, gives several options for POSSIBLE adoptees, who could do some damage. One of them will begin serving his three year sentence on March 6.

John Pate #88167 January 24, 2019 9:54 pm 1

Whilst the dimensions of the problem seem to be well agreed upon here what I don’t see described are the solutions. How are you going to prevent the government being taken over by the moochers and looters and sociopaths? I don’t see any extant government where this hasn’t happened. Central banking is one of the planks of the Communist Party Manifesto and seems to me to be a fundamental problem but nobody seems to have a way forward to eliminating that.Fundamentally your system has to appeal to certain moral premises to develop a framework within which behaviour is deemed accepted or unacceptable – a set of commandments if you like. What are those? The ones previously applied are rapidly breaking down everywhere.Although we can agree Libertarianism fails on several levels it seems to be it is at least operating in the right general area when it comes to identifying the primacy of the individual. We are men not ants or cattle.Are we re-imagining living in walled off ethnic enclaves when that time passed a long time ago, there’s modern technology to contend with.The urgent reality is an exploding sub-Saharan African population and cratering birth rates everywhere else. In principle that could be turned around in one generation… but in practice there’s absolutely nothing I can see that makes that a possibility. Once the African diaspora has metastasized in sufficient number the situation will be irretrievable and you’ll be looking at having to be smart enough to live in a gated community and have excellent kidnapping insurance.I’m currently in the Philippines and it’s how I imagine the future everywhere… police death squads, glittering glass and reinforced concrete 50+ story skyscrapers juxtaposed with sprawling squatter areas of tin-roofed shacks, truly awful traffic congestion, armed guards searching you on entry to every place of business, brown-outs and black-outs of electricity and water, systemic political and business corruption.The future will be present, only more so.

John Pate #88188 January 25, 2019 8:10 am 1

…by which I meant to say, the future will be like the present, only more so.

Dutch #88207 January 25, 2019 11:05 am 2

Government is and always has been a sanctioned and sophisticated skimming operation. Shackling the ability of government officials to participate in the skim is the best that we can do.

My_Comment #88166 January 24, 2019 9:33 pm 1

I can’t take any libertarian seriously who isn’t a racist. Reality is that a society with minimal government and a focus on individual responsibility requires a average IQ in the three digit level. Besides being dumber lower IQ people have less impulse control and greater criminality.That is why in greater Wakanda, Rwanda is such a stand out success story. The supreme ruler has a broken Windows policy towards running the country. He makes his people walk the strait and narrow or face consequences. It is also why blacks are more functional in the strict confines of the military than they are in civilian life.

My_Comment #88165 January 24, 2019 9:25 pm 1

“The best way to become a smart, educated person is to be born to parents who are smart and well educated.”True but race is still king. Kids from the poorest white families do better on standardized tests and have higher IQ than blacks from the wealthiest families. They also have a lower criminal rate than those blacks. A white and or eastern Asian school is always going to be preferable to middle class families than a black or Hispanic one.To Z’s point, many bright white kids from families that aren’t well educated do not end up becoming well educated. In some ways that makes sense because a poor white kid will not get the financial help given too a middle class vibrant. However, if they were given a chance and encouraged many poor white kids would become well educated. Even though this would be low handing fruit for universities to pluck to get more talent, poor whites are not the right people in the eyes of universities

Mike #88143 January 24, 2019 5:22 pm 1

I used to consider myself an Objectivist. In the end, Rand’s philosophy denies biology too. It started to Dawn on me when others looked at me funny when I expressed a lack of optimism regarding the prospects for certain minorities to embrace the ideology.When I finally became redpilled about women, it was over.I still think there are some good parts with regards to some technical aspects of epistemology in it, but the rest is just left libertarianism. The funny thing is if you look carefully you can find some hidden redpills in Rand’s writings. Just take a look at her essay about why she wouldn’t vote for a woman president.

BadThinker #88386 January 26, 2019 10:09 pm 0

I was once the same as you. Rand was very good at telling a certain kind of young, smart, alienated white man what he really, really, wants to hear.

Dale Peterson #88054 January 24, 2019 11:18 am 1

Z, I am having trouble reading your Gab feed. The page comes up but I cannot see your posts (and the same this is happening with other feeds). Is something wrong on Gab’s end? Or is it my end?

thezman #88058 January 24, 2019 11:23 am 2

Apple users seem to be having trouble accessing gab. Others have mentioned this. I’ll let Torba know, in case he is unaware.

thezman #88068 January 24, 2019 11:48 am 3

From Andrew: “They need to be signed in. Working on a bug with feeds while signed out not loading on profiles.” Make sure you sign and you should be fine.

jbspry #88290 January 26, 2019 11:18 am 0

The sorry state of education in America has been explained at length as the “dumbing down” of the curricula. What is rarely spoken of is the dumbing down of the student body.In the Dark Ages of pre-technological America a student went as far as his gifts and his motivation would take him, then found a place in the economy that matched his attainments. Some never attended school at all; they were the septic tank drainers, ditch diggers and Mencken’s “curve greasers”. Others went on to become scientists, economists and doctors who actually knew what they were doing and produced salubrious results from their employment. Consequently, the average product of a full 12-year education was a somewhat respectable citizen, the lesser ones performed useful labor and every person was suited to his station in life. This ad hoc sifting of students was condoned and accepted by society, and the Law did not forcibly sequester the dull-witted in school buildings for years after they had reached intellectual saturation.Nowadays, with compulsory attendance exacerbated by federal funding based upon overall school performance ratings, the “No Child Left Behind” fraud has the schools retaining those who were much better off leaving and getting a job greasing curves. The educators search desperately for ever-more dubious ways to keep the dimwits and social retards in the classroom in order to keep the Federal Cash flowing, at the expense of those who can and want to learn, and so education wastes away and the nation has to cope with an administrative regime that cannot spell “Administrative Regime”.LOL ROFLMAO OMG!

Deep Woods #88264 January 26, 2019 9:41 am 0

You anti-liberty folks seem to actually prefer the government run monopoly on education. I know you despise free markets. It shouldn’t be necessary to explain how competition in markets creates a higher quality product at a better price than what is available from a monopoly. There is endless empirical evidence for this mechanism if one cares to look.

UpYours #88221 January 25, 2019 1:55 pm 0

Hate on the libertarians all you want, but at least the Rand Paul contingent has Trump’s back when he needs unlike the cuck Right. At least libertarians walk the talk and I respect them for that even though I do not agree with them on economic and social issues, esp re: Immigration. And yes, they did influence the Tea Party that kept Obama in check. Obama dared not implement any gun control or amnesty in his 8 years thanks to the libertarian Tea Party.And really, what has the alt or dissident right accomplished, other than indulging in flinging poo at everybody else and pointless verbal diarrhea. You hate the libertarians as they are “sure of themselves”. What about the alt-right. For you, the answer to everything is race, race, and more race. Why is the sky blue: Alt-right answer, cause race.Insulting everybody is a sure way of ensuring your perpetual impotence, which is what the alt or dissident right will be forever.

DJ3way #88129 January 24, 2019 4:05 pm 0

is gab down? I cant see your gab feed anymore

thezman #88139 January 24, 2019 4:42 pm 1

You have to login to see activity.

newrouter #88161 January 24, 2019 8:43 pm 1

What is your name on Gab to follow?

newrouter #88170 January 24, 2019 10:10 pm 1

Via The Z blog,The Citizen In A Democratic Empirehttps://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-01-24/paradise-lost-americas-post-national-world

Christian Sweeny #88132 January 24, 2019 4:14 pm -5

“Look. Education is a function of biology.” Really? What about culture? What about Philosophical premises and values? I agree that biology may determine limits to potential; I don’t know how you would prove that. I know Negros and Hispanics who are brilliant thinkers, and they grew up in the slums. Yes, they are a minority within their class, but they exist, and this fact raises a question. Explain?“Parents who like learning and value knowledge, will have kids who like learning and value knowledge.” Really? I like your premise but I also know many individuals whose parents were brilliant, even some whose Jewish parents are extremely high achievers, who are ‘next generation’ failures at reasoning. In addition to biological potential, (your argument,) and opportunity after birth in different social environments, (the liberal argument,) there are factors other than biology and social environment, i.e., volitional and incentive factors, that result in higher levels of sustained curiosity and mental self-discipline.You ignored both the incentive to think and also the political freedom of speech. Consider the possibility that societies that adopt the essentially Free Market System of Economics, even the current communist system in China, will encourage the sustained thought process that we measure as intelligence. And then explain why Venezuela’s economy just imploded. Biology, by itself, explains very little.

thezman #88137 January 24, 2019 4:41 pm 14

I know Negros and Hispanics who are brilliant thinkers, and they grew up in the slums. Yes, they are a minority within their class, but they exist, and this fact raises a question. Explain?

Dean Jonathan Swift #88150 January 24, 2019 6:32 pm 9

“I know Negros and Hispanics who are brilliant thinkers, and they grew up in the slums.”No you do not. The Negros and Hispanics you know are not brilliant thinkers, they are merely a good deal smarter than you expected. It’s Talking Dog syndrome: a dog mysteriously recites five lines of Hamlet, and you think that is amazing, and it sort of is; but it doesn’t mean the dog is Philip Seymour Hoffman. Given the cultural conditions and intellectual strictures and limitations in this country at the present time, it is possible for there to be brilliant Negros in the arts, but there can be, and there are no, “brilliant” Negro thinkers. FFS, people of all races have been trained to think Malcolm Gladwell and NN Taleb are “brilliant thinkers,” what does that tell you?“Brilliant” is rare, “a good deal smarter” is not so rare. Ask me how I know.

LeafyGreen #88159 January 24, 2019 7:54 pm 1

How do you know?

Dean Jonathan Swift #88163 January 24, 2019 9:07 pm 1

It’s a perfectly fair cop for you to call my bluff (it was a somewhat lame rhetorical question though on my part) and honestly I’d love to give you a proper answer at leisure and at length, but an honest answer would eat up too much of Z’s bandwidth and turn the thread into an annoying unwanted fox-hunt. Bleh.I’ll give you a set of considerations though that gives at least a bit of the flavor of my reasoning. Consider:1. Robert Greene was smart but not brilliant.2. Kit Marlowe was brilliant but not smart.3. Will Shakespeare was both brilliant AND smart.4. Thomas Kyd was neither brilliant nor smart. (He was literate though, we’ll grant that much.)5. And just to be clear, Francis Bacon and the Earl of Whatsis have naught to do in these proceedings.Good as far as it goes, but please note they were all artists, not thinkers. For thinkers the ante goes WAY up. You get the idea, I hope.

BadThinker #88384 January 26, 2019 10:06 pm 0

I’m not sure there is even one brilliant person that is also a public intellectual in America today. Our last one, in my opinion, was probably Richard Feynman, he had both the creativity and the smarts that very few have.

Compsci #88209 January 25, 2019 11:30 am 1

Christian, I suggest you read (yeah, I know it’s not easy for most of us time constrained folk) Plomin’s new book: “Blueprint, How DNA makes us what we are.”Plomin tends to skirt around the issue of IQ differences, but what he says regarding such inheritance holds. All the information is current through 2018. And the aspect of behavior inheritance as stated above is talked about. Plomin has some interesting discussion on our inherited proclivities *shaping* our environment. In short, we shape the environment we experience rather than simply are passive recipients of an environment given us. And of course, studies are cited in support.Finally, I leave you with one caveat, anecdotes are not data. Want hard data, read Plomin. Want anecdotes, keep posting in the comment sections.

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